He reckoned the next two on his list for human extinction would volunteer themselves by sauntering up the hill to relieve their colleagues. He and Ben just lay in the low scrub and waited for them. They’d rearranged the bodies of the two dead guards to more resemble sleeping ones, and hoped it would be good enough in the dark.
He lay under some gorse across the small track from Ben, thinking. Something the men had said seemed odd to him, but he couldn’t work out why. In amongst the usual soldier shit, they’d touched on something that seemed relevant to him. In some ways, he wished they’d had time to question these foot-soldiers for the cause. Why were they doing this? What did they want out of it? He pictured the one who had spoken of living in palaces and castles and even here on the island. What did he think life would be like in a post-civilisation world? He seemed to think half-eaten people being kept alive in a human larder was funny. Did he not get that it was more likely that after an apocalypse of the kind he had been seduced into creating, he’d be the one in that hole? But Aleksey supposed that these men had a different take on life than he did: once you had been homeless, there literally was nowhere else to go but up.
His thoughts drifted to the little man, Billy, wondering if he’d been inside the lighthouse the whole time…how he lived...who he was. Although his theory about the spirit of Guillemot and the island had been slightly dashed, in others ways it still held, but was now only more mysterious.
He heard voices. As with their dead colleagues, there was no attempt to make this guarding job stealthy.
The positioning of the bodies almost worked perfectly. It fooled the two replacements long enough for Ben and Aleksey to rise from their concealment and reach open ground, but at the very last minute they must have seen the corpses for what they were, because both turned so that they saw the enormous dark figures emerging from moon shadow behind them. Ben went to one knee and fired, and took the closest man down. The other spun and bolted. He got to the edge of the cliff, glanced back desperately and then ran over the arch. It was possible that in the moonlight, not knowing the layout of the land, he didn’t see this for what it was, and perhaps assumed it was just more headland.
The sound of chunks of rock breaking off was audible despite the never-ceasing booming of the waves. He made it to the small joined stack and then realised he was trapped, nowhere to go but down, so immediately held up his hands.
Ben raised the gun once more but then lowered it, and Aleksey glanced over at him, slightly surprised—it was an easy shot. Ben toed the grass, unwilling to catch his eye.
They stood apart so their prisoner could cross back over. Aleksey suddenly recognised him as the second man in the armoury, but couldn’t recall his name.
It appeared the soldier had taken in more of his surroundings now, for he glanced down, his knees buckled, and he put his hands flat on the grass, peering down. ‘Fucking hell!’
They waited. Eventually, having little choice, he stood back up, appeared to close his eyes (although Aleksey gave him the benefit of the doubt this was just an illusion of the moon drifting in and out behind wisps of cloud), and dashed back across as fast as he could. He tried to continue his escape, beginning to zigzag away from them, but Ben caught and tackled him with as little effort as he captured and restrained Molly. The man’s breath went from him in a painedoomphas he was flattened to the turf.
Wright. Aleksey had remembered his name. Bailey and Wright.
‘Fuckers. You fuckers.’ Wright tried to kick Ben. ‘They were good blokes! You fucking killed them!’ Ben dragged him to his feet. The man took at look at Aleksey and laughed uproariously. ‘What the fucking hell! I dunno how you got here, mate, but Bailey should’ve aimed a fucking millimetre to the left and done the job proper. Look at the bleeding state of you! Christ, you’re a fucking Frankenstein.’
Ben hauled him around so they were face to face. Before Aleksey could intervene, Ben punched the grinning man. Ben easily and regularly bench-pressed a hundred and seventy kilos. The man’s face didn’t stand a chance. His jaw and teeth audibly broke as he flew back and hit the turf hard. Howling and then moaning, he tried to crawl away, but Ben was on him—another punch, then another. And then the moaning stopped. Aleksey put a hand on Ben’s shoulder, but it was shaken off, and finally there wasn’t much left to connect a fist to. Ben was punching nothing but mush.
Ben climbed slowly back to his feet, rubbing his blood-soaked knuckles, silent, closed off. Aleksey wondered whether he should try Ben’s finger-in-the-waistband tethering technique next time, but realised he really didn’t care how or why Ben killed these men—only that they died. Life was a privilege, and when you ceased to value it for others, you could hardly complain when it was taken from you. But he did not miss the significance that Ben had been the one willing to give the man the opportunity to surrender—Ben hadn’t been willing to shoot an unarmed man with his hands up. But…for him… Aleksey gave Ben a little sideward glance. His warrior angel had the capacity to surprise him, even after all these years.
Five down. Two to go.
They headed for cover once more. The sound of the gunshot would possibly not have carried as far as the house, but if the remaining two were out hunting for the chimera, they could have heard it.
They lay in the darkness under the trees near Kittiwake, considering their options. They didn’t know how many weapons the men had loaded into the car, but the fact they only seemed to have one to use for the guard post by the lighthouse told Aleksey they possibly only had the original two pistols he’d seen in the armoury, so Bailey, wherever he was, had one on him still. It did not appear as though they had a lot of ammo either, and they’d been wasting what they did have on them all afternoon.
He started fidgeting, trying to get more comfortable, and Ben glanced over at him. ‘What?’
Aleksey rummaged. ‘I am lying on something hard.’
Ben huffed and muttered something inaudible, but which Aleksey was fairly sure would be along the lines ofyou’ll be lucky. He got a more favourable reaction when he produced the iron key he’d liberated from Billy’s biscuit tin while the little man had been making friends with Ben. Then Ben’s face fell. ‘You’ve locked him out now. That seems a bit…mean.’
Aleksey rolled his eyes. Ben really wasn’t getting the end of the world plague thing. He wasn’t surprised. It did seem slightly surreal, even to him—and he was now the world’s greatest expert on flea vomit.
‘We might need to get back into the lighthouse.’ He scrapped a small indentation in the sandy soil, buried it, and then laid two sticks over it in the shape of a cross.
‘X marks the spot?’
Aleksey pursed his lips, pondering his little treasure. ‘There are strange things buried on this island now.’ Once more, he pictured people of the future finding them, digging them up, wondering what they were and how they had come to be hidden so. He’d had a friend in military intelligence in Russia who had once bought a cache of Roman coins off an auction site and had then left them buried in odd places around countries the Romans had probably never even heard of, let alone visited. When questioned on this odd hobby, he’d just shrugged and claimed he liked screwing with history.
‘They’d be more interesting if they were something good like hoards of Spanish gold.’ Ben laid his chin down on his folded arms, closing his eyes, sighing with tiredness.
Aleksey was very hungry, and assumed Ben would be on the point of actual starvation, so although Ben uncharacteristically hadn’t mentioned this once, it gave a certain impetuous to his new plan.
‘I think it’s time to go on the offensive. They have hunted us for long enough.’
They were lying on their bellies, watching the open spaces in front of them. Ben opened his eyes and turned his face to him, just a slightly paler glow in the moonlight. ‘I couldn’t see Squeezy’s boat—from the top of the lighthouse. Do you think they’re safe yet?’
Aleksey put his hand to Ben’s hair and tried to run his fingers through it, but it was too sticky. He huffed and cupped his stubble-rough cheek instead. ‘Yes.’
Ben shrugged his hand off. ‘You’re just saying that.’
